18/365: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr Rating: ★★★★½ Publication Date: January 1, 1980 Genre: fiction Pages: 160 Project: Project 365 In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.

I have a shelf of NYRB Classics. They are reliably good and, as a pleasant side benefit, they look fantastic lined up next to one another. My library also has a good selection of them available for check out in both print and digital formats. They tend to be quite pleasingly designed, with very nice paper, so I strongly prefer to read them in print.

This is not one of the books that I own, however. I have checked it out of my library twice, reading it first in 2020, and again today (yesterday, when this goes live). It’s one of the best that I’ve read, and that is definitely high praise, because I have loved many of the books published by NYRB Classics.

This is a perfect gem of a novel. It is told from the first person perspective of Tom Birkin, who arrives in the village of Oxgodby to uncover and restore a suspected medieval mural in the local church. Oxgodby seems to be a stand-in for the real Osgodby, a village on the north Yorkshire coast, where the author attended school.

This is a perfect summer read, replete with gorgeous language. Tom Birkin is a veteran of the Great War who is suffering from shell shock. Over the course of the book, he slowly uncovers the mural, which turns out to be quite a bit more significant than he expected, and he slowly recovers from his wartime experience. The descriptions of the glories of an English village/countryside summer are lovely.

Several of the villagers become prominent characters in the novella: Charles Moon, a fellow veteran who is in the village to locate a missing grave, the Reverend Keach, who is responsible for the restoration contract with Birkin, and his surprisingly beautiful wife, Alice, with whom Birkin falls in love. There is a second vicar, of the local low church, Ellerbeck and his wife, who play a sigificant role, and several other characters who play a small part in Birkin’s summer.

This one of those books which a review cannot do justice. My summers were entirely different from the one described in A Month in the Country, but, still, I found myself thinking about the indelible moments in my life in the same way that Carr was able to convince me that the summer Birkin spent in Oxgodby would represent that same sort indelible experience for him. The days that you cannot forget, not because they are particularly memorable, but because they somehow overflow with significance in their mundanity.

It’s a stunningly beautiful book that I will buy for my own shelves, so that I can return to it again and again.